Hello, this is the R4PG. And I know some of you are thinking-- so, stop thinking about that and start thinking about this. The portal in the Stormwind canals that was always off-limits. No doubt, many of you have heard rumors that it was going to be for player housing of some sort. For most people, it has always just been that, a popular rumor. We also provide another great promo for April Fool’s Day 2018, during which you can buy warmane gold, cheap Warmane Outland Gold and more Warmane products with up to 5% off. Let's see. 

Well, I've dug up some concrete information on it. But before we look at that, I also want to look at another locked-off area in Stormwind, otherwise, this article would be light on content and a bit short. And frankly, that's not how you go about making a revenue.

So, let's also look at what it sometimes gets confused with, and that's this. The Stormwind vault. In law is a place where they lock out beings that are too powerful to kill. I mean, why wouldn't you catch the beings that are so strong that you can't kill them? Stick them in a building that is right in the center of your capital city, literally meters from people's houses! 

Anyway, this disaster waiting to happen was planned PVE content, and if you use GM commands, you can get inside. There are exits that mayinly the same as the store room saccades, although the layout is totally different. It's a series of rooms that are linked together by very short passages. After quite a few of these rooms, the instant end with what appears to be some sort of boss room.

So, that was the Stormwind vault. But I did say this article was about another portal, so let's have a look at that. So here, in a much nicer part of the town, we have this gated-off portal. If we use GM commands to get to the other side of the gate, even if you touch the portal, it doesn't do anything. Plus, we can see that there's nothing around if you try to have a look around the corners.

So, what was Blizzard intending this to be? Well, there's actually a concrete answer given many years ago, during a Q&A session and printed on Blizzard's website. Using wayback machine, we can see that a Blizzard community manager actually does answer the question of their plans at the time for player housing and the state that this portal was planned to take the players to their houses. 

 

But the big question is what would these have looked like? Now, although there are files in the game, actually, under the section called "player housing," it doesn't really tell us the actual functions of what would happen. But I think that if we look at another game, from the same era, it might give us an idea of what it would have been. And we all know that Blizzard took a lot of inspiration from other MMO's at the time, while World of Warcraft was being developed.

And there was another game, at the time, that did have player housing, that was instant, with its entrance being in the capital city. That was Final Fantasy 11 Online. You had what was known as a Mog House. You would be in your home capital city, and you would run into your Mog House, and this would take you to your own house. Although really it was just a single room, with your own personal Moogle inside.

 

You remember Moogles? You remember those crazy little things from Final Fantasy 7? That's it. Here, we could place furniture that we had created or bought. You could display special furniture items that showed that you'd beaten a certain monster or part of the game. You could invite your friends over for a house party, but you could also grow plants that would yield special crystals that had gameplay benefit.

 

The Stormwind player house portal and the Final Fantasy 11 Mog House portal are very similar in design, so I think that Blizzard had this in mind when they started toying with the idea of a player house in World of Warcraft. Of course, they never got that far with the idea. And by Cataclysm, the portal was removed altogether. But in Warlords of Draenor, Blizzard did add Garrison's into the game.

 

So that's it! The portal was 100% intended to be for player housing. Some of you might have already known that, but I know there will be a lot that didn't know it was confirm. Anyway, that's it.